What’s next for media

Today I sat through a fascinating conference produced by Women in Periodical Publishing that was all about the changing media landscape. Called the annual Women’s Leadership Conference, the women leaders who spoke (disclaimer: I was on one of the panels) ran the gamut from 1960’s print magazines to some of the hottest newest online publications. I stayed all day because I found myself in a room full of smart innovators, talented writers, and bleeding edge ideas.

From the president of Dwell Media to the founder of AllVoices.com to the publisher of Sunset magazine to executive editor of Newsweek (who also won the 2009 award for Exceptional Woman in Publishing), I came to the conference in research mode, hoping to study and learn from these women. For the attendees, I hoped to impart a tad bit of my experience to help them move forward in their efforts. While those things did transpire, I also learned a great deal more about publishing as a business, possible new media and traditional media revenue streams, and market research.

The panel I sat on, “Where is the Media Revolution Headed?” set the tone for the day, following the opening keynote on “Beyond Equality: How Women Can Change Publishing – and the World.” Each session took a different angle on the challenges facing media organizations given the current climate in publishing and in the economy. As I listened to these women speak about their experiences as entrepreneurs, journalists and managers, I realized the entire media industry should be doing this – not just 150 women.

As the media shake-out continues, it’s clear a wide range of models will continue to be employed by publishers of various forms of media. It’s not necessarily about social media; it’s about content taking multiple forms on multiple platforms – videos, articles, shorter form posts, photos, music, concepts – on mobile, iPad, Kindle, web, print, TV, etc. A lot of talk in tech is about platform-indpendent data or media. Taking that and pairing it with multi-platform, multi-pronged revenue streams survived today’s discussion as the best road to success for media organizations.

What I felt most compelling, however, after a day with these women, was that the conference environment was highly collegial, open, inquisitive and positive. I felt that if these women continue making major changes in the landscape of media, good things will come through their well researched, highly collaborative style. It’s not that competitive nature was missing; on the contrary, there was a healthy competitive spirit in the air of these leaders. Instead, I felt the key principle was to be true to your audience and your community, regardless of platform, regardless of business model. Then just be willing to experiment with the rest and it will all come together. Check back with me five years from now to see where we are on this.